Engaged Jain Studies: Methods for Studying Engaged Jainism
Week 2, Wednesday 21 October 2.30-3.30, OCHS
Professor Christopher Jain Miller
Jains have espoused nonviolence and compassion for millennia, continually redefining and reengaging these and other principles with their changing social realities. Using case studies from contributors’ chapters in Engaged Jainism (SUNY 2026), I will present a three-fold set of inclusive methodological tendencies used in engaged Jain studies to study the field’s object, engaged Jainism.
These three tendencies include: 1) the constructive-reproductive model, through which researchers unquestioningly repeat emic Jain discourse, thereby reproducing approaches to the study of the Jain tradition initiated by romantic Orientalist scholars of the nineteenth century, 2) the critical-analytical model, which uses critical etic frameworks for analyzing emic Jain discourse, and has origins in colonial Orientalist studies of Jainism, and 3) the critical-constructive model, which draws from both the “critical-analytical” and “constructive-reproductive” models, engages etic epistemic frameworks with emic epistemic frameworks, and in the process remains open to the transformation of both scholars and Jains in the research process.
Participants will take away a renewed understanding of the ways that Jain social engagement can be effectively studied in the academy today, particularly in light of the manifold ways that scholars and universities engage with members of the Jain community supporting their research.
Christopher Jain Miller is Vice President of Academic Affairs and Professor of Jain and Yoga Studies at Arihanta Institute; Professor of Engaged Jain Studies at Claremont School of Theology; and Visiting Researcher at the University of Zürich’s Asien-Orient-Institut. He is the author of Embodying Transnational Yoga: Eating, Singing, and Breathing in Transformation (Routledge 2024) and co-editor of Engaged Jainism: Critical and Constructive Studies of Jain Social Engagement (SUNY 2026).
